


Feelings

by winterswept



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Asexual, Asexuality, Asexuality Spectrum, Bisexual Character, Bisexuality, Demisexuality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Friendship, Gray-Asexuality, Headcanon, M/M, Other, Past Relationship(s), Romance, Slow Burn, demisexual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-06 03:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16824277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterswept/pseuds/winterswept
Summary: He lifted his head to hold her gaze, his eyes unreadable."Who knows, besides you?"





	1. Skeletons

**Author's Note:**

> Set between Emperor Mage and The Realms of the Gods. Daine figures out Numair's secret; he figures out her.
> 
> I want so badly to read Tempests and Slaughter, which is sitting on my bookshelf and which I’ve been waiting for since 2004, but my mind won't let me open it until I write all my unsullied Numair/Daine headcanons down onto the page. So, here's this! #Angst!

Numair hadn't slept more than an hour the whole night.

It had been a few months since their momentous (and disastrous) trip to Carthak. After a few interminable weeks of telling and re-telling their stories for the disapproving scribes and bureaucrats of the court, Daine and Numair had been set free at last at the behest of the Duke of Tarmal, who requested their help in investigating a new series of spidren attacks on his easternmost fort. Eager to leave the contemptuous atmosphere of the Capital at last, Daine and Numair had happily adapted back into their old role of traveler-companions, riding by day and camping at night as they began the two-week journey to Tarmal.

Now they were camped on the side of a lake at the far Eastern edge of the realm. It was a night like any other, except that when a rogue squirrel scavenging through her bedroll for crumbs woke Daine at dawn, and she turned on her side to greet the new friend, she realized that her two-legged companion was gone.

She rose and walked a spell and found him sitting by the edge of the lake, staring blankly out at the horizon.

"Numair?"

He seemed distant; she doubted he wanted anything but to be alone with his thoughts. She sat down cross-legged next to him. 

"I'm here when you're ready."

His gaze flashed over to her, and he smiled sadly. "You can go back to sleep, magelet. I'm fine."

"You don't look fine," the girl retorted. She took his hand in hers. "You can talk to me, you know. With all the questioning, we still haven't had a chance to talk directly since Car..."

He sighed.

"since all of it."

Numair looked down at his lap, and Daine felt the guilt of knowing that had started in the aviary begin to creep up her spine again. It was an itch, and she was tired of dealing with it.

"Numair..." she began. "You should know that I know."

That got his attention—to some extent. Distractedly, he asked, "What do you know?"

"I have an idea about you and Ozorne."

He turned to her. "An idea?"

"I'm attuned to these things, Numair. You know the quarrels I heard about, living with my mother. The women who came to her for advice. I know when someone is hurting in love."

His body tensed all at once—and then, just as quickly, she watched his muscles relax a shade too far, as if he was trying for normalcy. He said nothing.

"I imagine you loved him when you were in school. Two powerful mages, your powers keeping you apart from the rest of your class, close together. And then when he...changed....you didn't know how to stop loving him."

Numair's eyes were glazed over, staring fixedly at a spot on the lake where a few dragonflies overhung a cattail.

"What I can't figure out is if he ever loved you."

The man turned to the girl at his side, and his voice came out more shakily than he meant it to, false-stolid. "I'm not sure what led you to that conclusion."

Now it was Daine's turn to sigh. Again she placed her fingers on his wrist.

He hated when she touched him like this. Or, maybe "hated" was the wrong word. It made his stomach dip, and he knew the right thing to do would be to move away from her touch, and yet he never did.

She felt him tense again. "Numair, you don't need to keep this from me. I already know."

He swiveled slowly to face her. The glaze in his eyes had faded away in favor of something else—an alarm continually ringing behind closed doors, an ongoing silent panic.

"You've been years and years without letting anyone in on this. Don't you think you deserve a break? It might be nice for you to have this all told."

He lifted his head to catch her gaze, his eyes unreadable.

"Who knows, besides you?" 

She squeezed his wrist and hand. "Just me. No one else saw it. I promise."

His voice still shook. "You're sure."

"I'm sure. If they knew, you would have heard of it by now."

In an instant he knew she was right. If Alanna or Duke Baird had figured out his secret, they would have accosted him before the boats had sailed a furlong from the Carthaki shores. But Daine alone had left him a month to gather his thoughts, only addressing the subject when she saw him rise from a nightmare, pulling away from their camp, to contemplate his past alongside the dragonflies by the lake at dawn. Gods, he was grateful to have her. And gods, what he wouldn’t give to have this new creeping feeling he felt around her, like that old adolescent infatuation, leave his body before it saw the light of day. Nothing good would come of this; nothing ever had.

He looked back at his lap, thankful of the wards around the camp that would stop his voice from carrying. In this moment it was only the two of them. Ceding to her assumptions, he asked, "So what do you know?"

"I know you loved him. I know you still...I imagine he knew it then, and now. But I don't know him enough to know how he felt. Were you and Ozorne truly involved, back then?

Numair's eyes were glassy now. He squeezed her hand, still looking determinedly at his lap. "He put you in a cage."

"We're not talking about me."

Numair lifted his gaze to hold hers, and with a breath he let it out at last. "I did love him. It was ill-advised.”

Daine kept silent, her hand holding his.

“We were lovers. "The two of us...We were barely teenagers when we met. We were captivated by the spells we read about; we spent nights researching all of the obscure olden magic, ancient spells we might bring back to life.

"With Varice, we worked to open the throne for him. But meanwhile it was always him and I, late in the night, exploring the magic...One night I was—coy, I asked him if I could try an anti-inhibition spell. We let our guards down, and he kissed me, and he—"

Numair shifted, uncomfortable. “I've never told anyone before."

Daine nodded. "I know."

Numair was reddening—a strange sight for the swarthy, usually confident older man.

Daine relaxed her grip on his hand. "You don't have to tell me what you don't want.”

Numair crossed his legs as well, and fixed his gaze on the patch of grass at his feet. "I loved him. I loved him, I felt about him a way I hadn't felt about anyone before then. But we knew we couldn't let anyone know. He was….adamant, that it all had to stay between us. Everything we did was behind wards and closed doors. Obsessive. If anyone had found out……we had worked for years to for him to be the heir to the throne. To restore his family to their rightful place. If anyone knew what we were doing—how we were with each other—that all would have been taken away. And it would have been catastrophic for us; Carthak isn’t...permissive on those sorts of things. And so he became more and more paranoid.”

Numair looked up, and held Daine’s gaze.

“He didn’t want me to drink at parties, in case I let anything slip. He told me to date other women for show—and I turned half-heartedly to Varice, who deserved better than that—all to distract attention from our closeness. He hated that I was attracted to women, too, while he couldn’t imagine a life with one, even when holding the Throne would require it. That jealousy ate at him, the knowledge that I could live a normal life with a woman, pretend women were all I ever cared for, when he couldn’t. And loving him was good, for the first few years—revelatory, and new, and raw, and powerful, but by the end….I compare it to Onua and her husband, without the hitting. Abuse with words, with feelings, rather than physical strength.”

Daine watched his face, absorbing, blue-grey eyes filled with compassion.

“When we were to graduate, I asked him what he expected.” Numair looked out at the lake once more. “Was I to be his personal mage, his secret, his concubine, while he ruled the nation? By then I knew the relationship wasn’t healthy. I told him it was over, and he took it poorly, of course. He worried I would spill out his secret. And you know the rest.”

She did. The rest was Thaki dungeons, guards and torture, ropes and chains that left Numair with marks on his torso and nightmares to this day. And now she knew that the pain went deeper than the physical—that everything had been done to him on his former lover’s orders.

“I’ve never told anyone that.” Finally, he looked into her eyes. Searched them.

“It couldn’t have been easy.” She squeezed his hand. Then, on a whim, she scooted over, leaning in to put her head on shoulder, and wrapped her arms around his neck. She nuzzled into his collarbone and held him still.

“Thank you for telling me.”

Numair looked down, breathing heavily, and, after a moment, pressed his nose into her hair and kissed her head as lightly as he could.

“Thank you for seeing it.”


	2. An Understanding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Numair is his own PR team and demi Daine learns why people do slutty things.

Over the next week they’d continued their journey to the fort. The first day was the same as any they had spent travelling together, except that Daine could practically see her companion’s thoughts vaulting from one side of his mind to the other so fast as to make them both dizzy. When they stopped to water the horses at midday, she caught Numair turning a coin over and over through his fingers, a tic he let wash over him when he was anxious, even though he knew that kind of restlessness drove her mad. When Cloud was fully taken care of, Daine stepped in front of the lanky mage, stood on her tip-toes, laid hands on his shoulders, and looked straightlong into his eyes as she would a disobedient stallion.

“Relax,” she ordered. “It’s fine.”

He looked surprised, which meant he thought he was being ordinary. She huffed and walked away to re-fasten her saddlebag. Numair reassumed a thankfully unremarkable bearing for the rest of their ride, which Daine spent in quiet conversation—only some of which was about mages-who-think-they-know-so-much—with her good friend Spots.

They stopped to set up camp as the sun set. It was Numair’s turn to cook and dole out the evening meal, and once she’d unpacked her necessities Daine had time to spend alone in quiet meditation. When she opened her eyes she saw that Numair had portioned out a bowl for her. They ate in silence a while, enjoying the night and one another’s company, before Numair decided to come out with it.

“While we’re on the subject,” he remarked, as if they had been in conversation once that day since dawn, “would you mind my speculating on your sexuality?”

“My what?”

He fidgeted. “Your sexuality. How you’re oriented toward others in terms of who you might be sexually attracted to. For example, as you have apparently figured out, I’m b—" For a half-second it had lodged in his throat, though he kept speaking as if it hadn’t. “Bisexual. Attracted to people both of and outside my gender.” When a second passed without a response, he continued the explanation. “It’s a descriptor first coined by Gallan scholar A. Kinsey under a theory established around 380 HE. Kinsey wrote that two-legger sexuality existed on a spectrum, wherein one end of the continuum represents those who…”

This was usually around where Daine’s thoughts trailed off and she searched around for a chipper wing-friend or grass-grazer to talk to silently while she waited out her teacher’s commentary. But this time she really did want to listen. The events of the last few months had replaced her juvenile conception of her friend’s university years—an image of her teacher, then a young and charming, yet bookish crowd-pleaser, struggling heroically toward greatness—and filled her instead with a vision of a different young Numair. He had, he once told her, tied a wall of ancient magic into the lining of his lungs, creating a barrier that held certain words back behind his lips. Now she wondered what exactly had pushed him to do so. As he talked through his theories of sexuality, and she remembered his troubled relationship with Ozorne, she thought she might know. She imagined days in the old stone buildings she had just visited, when a young Numair had spent months reading biographies itemized in encyclopedic prose, the man sheathing his rising desires with blunted terminology and speculative philosophy. He would have spent nights apart from his class, locked behind his dormitory walls, spurning his peers in favor of the forbidden text-friends who offered strange words and the comfort of a hidden-away home.

It was a form of solitude she’d known well, as she pored over her biology texts in much the same way in those early days. Yet she knew if Numair mentioned this all to their friends today, they’d see a different picture than her. What sort of diagrams were in those books he had read? And what exactly was it he was memorizing?

“…though there are a few scholars with competing models, some of whose ideas are well-worth entertaining. For example, we could look to the work of the early Tusainian reformers…”

Daine had watched her friend drink up enough new textbooks, and live through enough earth-shaking events, to know when a theory or subject had profoundly shaped his perspective. Those early days spent in silent reverence of sexuality studies were to him were like the appearance of the immortals: before they arrived, who had questioned that there was intelligent life apart from humanity? And after the war began, who was still to doubt it?

Daine looked for a means to steer him down from theory back into their reality. When he reached a pause, she offered, “So what would your Kinsey man call me?”

“I’m not sure Kinsey could provide the best way to define you—as I mentioned, there’s a few competing theories.”

“Why would the scholars make it easy,” she mumbled.

He smiled. “But the evidence underlying any answer will be who you are attracted to.”

She raised a brow. Did he want names?

A pause, and she looked down and drew a circle in the dirt. “I thought _you_ were going to tell me who I liked.”

He looked thoughtful. “Very well. Let’s imagine you’re at…at the Winter ball. The most gorgeous person in the realm enters the room and asks you for a dance. They are finely dressed, kind, and charming. Would you be interested?”

“Don’t you need to tell me first if they’re a man or a woman?”

“We’ll approach that question indirectly. With a person of your preferred gender, provided you have one, would you take their hand?”

Daine hesitated. “Are they a friend of the court? Do I know them?”

Numair smiled thinly. “So—and I don’t call this question a fool-proof test by any means—you’re saying your answer relies on who the person is to you, rather than who they are in general. And you wouldn’t want to dance with them unless you had some sort of connection to them. Is that right?”

“What, so you would just dance with a stranger?” Daine snapped.

“Likely so. If she was pretty enough. And if it was a pretty man, and we lived in a different world, I would dance then as well.”

“Well that’s fair foolish. And you forget that men don’t have to worry about certain sorts of things, but—”

“I don’t mean to ask you how you _would_ act so much as how you would _want_ to act. I’m attempting to gauge your level of attraction to this imaginary person. And you’re saying that if the most eligible bachelor asked for your hand—for a dance, or a dinner, or perhaps a moonlight stroll by the lake—you wouldn’t be at all tempted.”

“He’s a _stranger_. He could murder me in my sleep.”

“I doubt he would try, unless he wanted a horde of squirrels, cats, sparrows, and one very angry mage clawing his eyes out the next morning. But you’ve effectively made my point.” His dark eyes were amused. “So I would call you demisexual. You may be attracted to men, or women—we can discuss that further in due course if you want, and we can label you further after that if you’d like, though I doubt your breath is bated waiting for it—”

“A demi-what?”

“Demisexual, meaning that you can become attracted to those with whom you form an emotional bond. It’s on the spectrum of asexuality—those for whom sexual attraction occurs less than for the non-asexual members of the populace.”

“So I’m—” she used his word, which felt for all the world like a euphemism but was the only barrier left making this conversation with her teacher feel bearable rather than obscene— “ _attracted_ to whoever I’m bonded with?

“Not at all. You _can_ become attracted _only to those_ to whom you’re emotionally connected. But you won’t become attracted to every person whose platonic company you enjoy. Correlation is not the same as causation, magelet.”

She sighed as he fell back on his favorite phrase. “But I don’t understand why this needs a name. You’re saying it makes me special?”

“Researchers like to give everything a name, as you well know. But having this rule about emotional closeness as an additional barrier that might eliminate potential mates is not, as far as we can tell, the default status for two-leggers. I would not consider myself demi- or asexual, nor would most of our friends, I don’t think.”

“So….” She felt it click. “Other people would feel a want to kiss the pretty stranger, just because they’re pretty.”  
  
“Yes. I would more than kiss the pretty stranger.”

“…But that’s ludicrous!”

He smiled. “It’s a different preference than yours.”

“So when…” she stopped, then hurried through it. “When Sela of Radeion went back to your tower after the Riders’ party. But you’d never met before then. That was because…?”

He shifted. “I liked her. She’s…well, you know how she looks. What she’s like.”

“I do, and she’s a real pill.”

He laughed. “Well, I didn’t talk to her much. But yes, that’s the sort of first-encounter situation I’m describing, with which you’re saying you would not think to engage.”

Daine thought about that for a moment. She had never considered that Numair had felt _attracted_ to the strange women he spent time with in that way. She certainly never felt that way about someone new—and, to be frank, she rarely felt that way about anyone at all. But it was starting to make sense. As he was describing it, apparently, other people could have desires all the time for no reason. With strangers on the street, or across the room, based on scent or looks or pheromones alone, without wishing or wanting it. Just like her animal friends.

She thought back to a day a season back when she had been having a dress tailored by Kuri. The woman had questioned her incessantly about a new arrival at the stables, a handsome man named Caerlo who had attracted a fair amount of attention from the single women of the castle. Having worked with him for a week by then, Daine knew that the hostler left his workstation untidy in the evenings and could be fairly short with recruits. She didn’t understand why anyone was so perturbed by his presence, yet Kuri’s interest was insistent.

She rustled from thought as Numair’s voice drifted back in again.

“You’ve never felt that way, that rush, toward someone you didn’t know completely?”

She looked down and shook her head. They each drifted back to their own thoughts, Daine back onto those strange questions her women-friends had asked her about men over the years. After a few minutes Numair spoke again, his voice distant.

“I _should_ say, while I won’t deny being attracted to Sela, that my attitude and actions toward women at the court were an affect I had…to an extent…cultivated for the sake of saving my reputation, after everything that happened with Ozorne. Though my disposition toward those women hasn’t been without its merits, of course.”

 _Cultivated,_ she thought. So Numair Salmalín, newly named and planted in Tortallan soil, had grown himself like a fruit from the vine for all the women of the court. He’d let the palace gossip swirl around him by design, so that no one thought to look back to the years spent alone with a man across the sea.

Sharing a bed in order to _save_ a reputation—now that was a new one. A woman would never get away with it—and her mother had tried.

They finished their soup in silent contemplation and company. When Numair stood to gather their plates, Daine handed hers over and stretched before moving to ready herself for sleep. Numair came back to settle into his bedroll beside the fire, and she sat on hers, a few feet away on the opposite side, and flexed her hand open and shut absentmindedly. “So now…we know things about each other.”  
  
“It sounds like we knew before today. But now we know that we know.”

She blushed. “So what happens in a few days when we meet Alanna and the others at the fort?”

He cocked his head and spoke softly. “What do you think should?”

Daine looked around at the camp, the horses off to the side, their small oasis in the meadowlands. It was easier when it was just the two of them travelling together, before city life and city friends got in their way. It always felt like that.

“Let’s just keep this here, I think. We understand it better than…” she trailed off. “That’s what you want, no?”

“It is. And I think it’s best. For now, at least.”

They were silent for a moment before Numair spoke again, his voice steady as he picked at a nail. “So we have a few days more to talk about this, and then back to all business. We’ve some immortals to confront, if you remember.”

Daine smiled. Back to how it always was, then: Days on the road with her roguish friend, speaking of things only they understood, sharing something that felt like it was really something. And then abruptly back to a different, though still cherished life: Numair a bit more distant, polished, _affected_ , as he’d said, when they were in the company of other friends and colleagues. She curved into her bedroll, dropping her eyes to his across the flames. “I’m ready for anything with you.”


End file.
